Social collaboration best practices in workplaces – Part 1, 09/10/17, Swarms and Crowds

October 09, 2017

Social collaboration best practices in workplaces – Part 1

It has always been an established fact that companies have depended on the merits of employee social collaboration for the generation of new ideas and for innovation. Management needs to accept the chaos during the initial stages before they venture out to making detail product development plans. We can learn a lot from other companies on ‘how to foster social collaboration’ who have been trailblazers in this field.

Please find below some of the best practices, which we can adopt to make social collaboration successful in organizations.

Having a curated and facilitated collaborative environment

Often a regular feedback is that employees get overwhelmed and often get distracted with collaboration overload. Ton Davenport, the distinguished professor in Information technology, analytics, and knowledge management at Babson College in his interview for MIT Technology Review says that for collaboration to succeed, organizations need to have a limited use of it. This means, employees need to collaborate for a limited period to avoid getting overwhelmed. Social collaboration at work does not mean that everybody in the organization needs to collaborate. Sometimes, it would do more good if we limit it to people who are naturally keen and have intrinsic ability to collaborate.

We would see more and more organizations favoring curated and facilitated collaborative environments. In a recent research study, conducted at IBM, they found that the employees source of inspirational ideas were within the organization rather than outside. Employers insist that managers and their direct reports spend enough time to scan their own business function to assess and identify the business needs and gaps for collaboration before they venture out with their colleagues from other business units.

Organizations are keen on responsible action from their employees on collaboration activity. With a return to curated and facilitated collaborative environment, organizations can ensure that their senior employee’s time is prioritized and they can spend time on sharing their inputs and expertise in internal meetings rather than spending much of their time on external social networking.

This article piece first appeared in SAP by the same author.

Cheers.